OT: Memphis Football Return on Investment
I'm sure that most of us who have been out of college for a little while have some amount of money saved for retirement--or you're blowing it on hard drugs. Seriously though, anyone with stock in Fed Ex may want to reconsider.
I'm all for random super rich dudes blowing their cash, but this article is talking about using 10 million a year from Fed Ex to sponsor Memphis's inclusion in a BCS AQ conference. I'd be beyond livid if I were a shareholder. It's one thing to pay for a company name on the Orange Bowl, but I don't know that any team is worth 10 million a year to a company that doesn't make sporting goods. To contrast, Michigan signed their Adidas contract for about 7.5 million.
word on the street is that FedEx is not going to be Orange Bowl sponsor this year - maybe this is why.
It is part of it, but Memphis doesn't exactly get the same level of exposure as the Orange Bowl.
It is officially now the Reese's 2011 Orange Bowl.
If I was an employee I'd be royally pissed at FedEx. That money could go to employee bonuses, raises, etc. It's one thing for a company tro have an advertising and PR budget, but for a company to serve simply as an extension of the Athletic Department's treasury....pass.
I saw a thing on this earlier, and I'm still confused. How in the world can FedEx get away with doing this? If they actually pay Memphis in, that's about eual to bribery. And I don't care who has what power at FedEx, how in the world can such a move make it by enough of management in what is effectively throwing huge sums of money at a smallish basketball school.
I'M SO CONFUSED!
Is it really so different than the Big 10 offering Nebraska a significantly larger amount of TV revenue to join the Big 10?
The Big Ten got Nebraska by doing this:
You're making A dollars in the Big XII, which is an unequal cut. We cut our cash equally and every one of our schools made B dollars, which is far more than you did. B divided by 12 is still more than your A, and if you join us, our totals will go up even higher. On top of that, you'll be in a group of elite academic universities with great traditions and athletic teams.
Memphis trying to get in a BCS conference:
We know the guy who runs FedEx, and he'll give you $10 million a year straight up if you take us.
An athletic department obviously as crooked and immoral as the b-ball coach who just left them.
We are talking about memphis right now on this blog when we would have never considered talking about memphis football in the past because of a connection with fedex, doesn't this mean its already a good investment for them?
Smith owns 15 million shares of FDX stock. Actually, he owns a little more than 15.5 million...which closed at $80 on Friday. So he's got more than $1.2 billion in stock. They've paid out about $0.10 a share in quarterly dividends. But he's going to use the COMPANY dime for his own vanity trip.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like investor fraud or anything.
A couple of years ago, there was a guy from the Deustche Bank screaming at a CostCo shareholder meeting that because the company didn't pay its employees minimum wage and had the audacity to offer health care benefits, he was planning on suing the company for wasting shareholder funds.
Hopefully, that guy owns at least one share of FDX.
doesn't this mean its already a good investment for them?
Maybe they should take off all their clothes, set their hair on fire and run around on Beale Street. We'd probably talk about that too.
I have been to Beale street a few times, good fun, but I no longer have any hair.